Themes
The album documents the life and adventures of a character called Venus as she moves "from a small town to a big metropolis". The band have been consistent when describing this central story of "running away from relationships, breaking up in a small town, moving to the big city, losing yourself, having your innocence completely corrupted, and living to tell the tale as a wiser person", however, several conflicting explanations have been given for the appearance of this narrative arc. Chief songwriter Gruff Rhys has claimed that Hey Venus! was conceived as a concept album:
| “ | At lot of the songs have the same central theme ... Some songs link up to that story more than others, but some were left off the record, they'll be on the next one, which we're working on already. It started off as a concept, but then we chose songs for their merit rather than their themes. | ” |
However both drummer Dafydd Ieuan and Rhys himself have contradicted this statement, Ieuan stating that, although there are "a number of crossovers between songs ... the similarities are more because all the songs were written during a certain period of time", while Rhys claimed, in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, that he only noticed the similar themes running through the songs after he had written them:
| “ | I came up with the idea of kind of applying all of these different stories to this Venus character as a way of making this character to represent all of these personal songs ... It was more a way of structuring and compiling the album after the songs had already been written then writing a concept album per se. | ” |
A third explanation was provided by Rhys during an interview with American music magazine ALARM when he claimed that the concept only came about when sleeve designer Keiichi Tanaami asked what the album was about:
| “ | ... We said all the songs were postcards from the life of this character Venus, who we fished out from a song called "Into the Night". So we applied the whole record to her, and it meant Mr. Tanaami could have a reference point to make an illustration from. | ” |
After the Super Furry Animals had decided to call the album Hey Venus! they remembered "slightly too late" that the name had already been used by Northern Irish band That Petrol Emotion for a single taken from their Chemicrazy LP. However, as Rhys and Guto Pryce in particular were fans of the band, they reasoned that it "wasn't necessarily a bad thing to share a name" with the song.
Read more about this topic: Hey Venus!
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)